Celebrating my Internship – Internfair, a festival to remember!
Jithin S Varghese a.k.a Fwani is an IIT Madras student who was inducted into Internshala circle after he pointed out how our one of facebook contests which relied on number of ‘likes’ to declare winner was a clear violation of facebook policies and could get our page banned! A true go getter, fight putter, winner material yet emotional, a BioTech student by degree and an HR professional at heart; Jithin recounts his experience of leading Internfair team back in Dec’11-Jan’12.
Almost 10 months back, I fell in love with this concept called Internshala. Similar sites existed, but none with a team like this. Sarvesh was an alumnus of my college and it was easy to connect with him. And after Sidharth started interning with Internshala, I felt I was missing out on what was going on there. So, when Sarvesh asked me to head Internfair, I jumped up at the first opportunity. The first ever Online Internship festival. I was/am a part of my college festivals but this was a totally new challenge. We worked as 3 hubs- Gurgaon, IIM Ranchi-NIT Durgapur and IIT Madras.
The Beginning: The first task given to me was to get the right people. Good people ARE the key! I needed someone who will have enough fundaes on managing large festivals. Kaushik Mohan, my senior in IIT Madras was the first choice. So the three of us (including Sarvesh) decided that we ought to have the best team possible to be put together at IIT Madras. Sidharth was interning with Internshala already and through him I met his co-intern Sonal. We figured we needed more people to ensure that this will be of the scale we imagined it to be. Suthirth, Jozzire, Sarathram, Pallavi, Sowmya, Akshit and Neeraj came on board to take care of Spons, PR and Publicity. We needed some really good Designers and Coders (Online Festival!). Hence, Sreenath, Anzal, Chetan,Govind, Karthik and Vishwajith started helping out.
The Process: All of us worked seamlessly throughout November, December and January. One of the best experiences of your life is having your Insti alumnus crashing in your room for a week and both of you waking up at 3 am to design a teaser. Amazing feats were pulled off. Contacting 400 colleges with a team of 4 in a week, managing multiple PR campaigns, Coordinating logistics, and ensuring that every college was accounted for. We took part in multiple conference calls. There were challenges, but with such an awesome team working with you, all these were purely fun.
The Result: An amazing fest, amazing people and an amazing start-up. Over 5K students participating and getting a meaningful experience, over 3lac students all over India appreciating the concept of Internshala; it was an amazing feeling. Internshala is an organization, I feel, one can never say bye to. I interned with a couple of other companies as well, but I can truly say from the depth of my heart that the feeling that one gets from being a part of Internshala is incomparable. We didnt intern with Internshala, we owned it.
It was all fun and never work. In this regard, the tagline lived upto it’s name. We celebrated our Internship!
